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This weekend I wanted to play a little with baking a cake and decorating it since it has been a while since I’ve made and decorated one. I decided upon a vanilla cake, baked it, then the big decision was what kind of frosting I would use. I prefer buttercream, but it doesn’t set up as well as the frostings I’ve made with shortening. I really don’t like the frostings made with just shortenings, so I decided to do a mixture. The recipe was inspired by the recipe I found on I Am Baker‘s website.

To make the buttercream, you will need:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup shortening (I realized I put in a whole stick when I only needed half, but it still turned out pretty well with the whole stick)
1 two pound bag of powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
1/2 cup milk (I used Vanilla Silk Milk)

Directions:
1. Put the butter, shortening, vanilla extract, and almond extract in the mixer and cream together about 30 seconds.
2. Dump the entire bag of powdered sugar in, along with the milk. Mix until creamy and desired texture. You can add more milk if you’d like your frosting to be thinner.
3. Enjoy!

I kept my frosting a bit stiffer since I knew I’d be decorating the cake using rosettes.

I am making some cake pops for a photography class I am taking from Beryl next weekend and I wanted to try out a new design- a camera! I’ve never really shown how I make my cake pops, so here are all the steps I went through to create them!

What you will need:
Cake made from a cake mix
Container of store-bought frosting
About a half of a package of Oreo cookies crushed
Cookie Scoop
Sucker sticks
Candy Melts- black if you are making the cameras, or whatever color you choose if you are just making the pops
Small round sprinkles in white and any other color of your choosing
Ball sprinkles
Styrofoam Block
Wax paper

First, I made a vanilla cake from a box. If you don’t want all cake pops you can make half of the batter into cupcakes and half into a cake.

After the cake cooled I broke it up into small pieces. I use my hands to break it up- it’s just easier than trying to use a fork, spoon, or something else.

My husband requested cookies and cream cake pops so I smashed up some Oreos and added them to the top of the broken up cake…

Then mixed all the pieces in.

Then I took about three-fourths of a container of icing and put it on top of all the pieces.

I have found it much easier, again, to mix everything with my hands. I usually take the cake pieces and put them on top of the icing so it’s not quite as messy. My mix looked like this after I was done. You want the mix to be moldable and not too sticky.

I used a cookie scoop to help make sure I used about the same amount of the mix for each cake ball/camera. I only made six cameras since I was just trying them out.

Then, I put the cake balls and cameras in the freezer for about 15 minutes to harden a bit. While the dough was cooling I set everything up that I would need to decorate the cake pops. For the camera cake pops, I melted black candy melts, took out 6 white small round sprinkles, and three blue and three pink sprinkles to use as the “button” on the top of the camera. For the pink cake pops, I melted the pink candy melts and had all the sprinkles in a bowl ready to put on the pops. I also put down wax paper to protect the table, had the sticks ready, and a Styrofoam board set up to stand the cake pops after they were decorated.

After I had everything ready, I took the cake balls/cameras out of the freezer. I dipped the ends of the sticks in the melted chocolate and stuck it into the cake balls and cameras.

I let these dry for a bit, then started by dipping the cameras into the black melted chocolate. I tapped any excess chocolate off of the cameras, then immediately put the white sprinkle where the “lens” was and the pink or blue “buttons” on the top while the chocolate was still wet. I then put them in the Styrofoam to dry.

I followed the same process for the pink cake pops, except I only put the white ball sprinkles on the top of the cake pops while the candy coating was still wet.

After I finished all of them, I put them in the freezer to harden the chocolate coating.

To finish them off and see what the “finished product” would look like, I put a couple of them in the sucker bags and tied them off with a pink polka-dot ribbon.

My husband gave me his approval of the cake pops, eating two before I even posted this blog post!